Reviewed: September 13, 2003
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Buena Vista Interactive

Developer
Monolith Productions

Released: August 26, 2003
Genre: FPS/RPG
Players: 16
ESRB: Teen

9
10
9
9
9.3

System Requirements

Playing and enjoying TRON 2.0 doesn’t require you to have watched the 1982 movie, but I still recommend you do check out the movie if you haven’t seen it. It is one of those landmark achievements in cinema that has yet to be matched, even with today’s new technology. While the stories are totally independent there are some loose ties that fans of the film will appreciate.

You play as Jethro “Jet” Bradley, son of Alan Bradley (from the movie). Alan is working on perfecting the digitizing technology that was used in the movie to transport Flynn inside the company mainframe. Through a series of events, Jet is digitized into the computer to assist Ma3a, the computer AI, and thus the adventure begins.

This living computer world is represented by some visionary artwork and effects that would put the Vegas strip to shame. The world is highlighted in colorful neon borders and programs, scripts, viral infections, and ICP’s (anti-virus counter measure programs) are represented by humans dressed in glowing suits.

TRON was ahead of its time back in 1982 and the designers have done an incredible job of “keeping up with the times”. Technology has changed a lot in the past 20 years and TRON 2.0 reflects those changes by including levels designed around PDA’s, Firewalls, and even the Internet. The game will toss around techno jargon that computer techs and network engineers will love and everyone else will dismiss much like those fancy terms used in Star Trek.

TRON 2.0 not only offers a truly unique world to explore but the gameplay borders on revolutionary. With TRON 2.0’s RPG and augmentation system I’ve heard comparisons being made to Deus Ex, and while those are valid I would go as far as saying TRON 2.0 implements the concept much better.

Jet has a health bar that represents his personal energy and an energy bar that that indicates how much power he has to use for charging weapons or accessing systems. Each time Jet interfaces with a system or data cube it costs a certain amount of energy to download items such as email, video archives, or new subroutines.

Maintaining the guise of an RPG, Jet also has several abilities that can be upgraded throughout the game. Instead of “experience points” Jet collects “Build Points” for completing objectives or locating the 100 Build Notes scattered about the game. As you collect these points your “version number” increases. Each time this rolls over to a new whole number you get to upgrade attributes like health, energy, download speed, etc. This allows you to tailor Jet, and in a minor way, the gameplay to your personal style of playing.

Where TRON 2.0 really shines is in the augmentation process. Jet’s available memory is limited by the system he is currently in. He may have a dozen memory blocks inside the mainframe, but when he gets transported to a PDA that will be cut drastically. This means you are constantly juggling the various subroutines to best serve your current situation.

Subroutines come in three flavors, Defense, Combat, and Utility, and there are many types of programs that fit into each of these categories. Each program can be upgraded from Alpha to Beta and finally Gold. To upgrade a program you need to locate and use a Code Optimization Ware (C.O.W.), a little device that scurries about the level like a robotic vacuum cleaner. As you upgrade each program it becomes more powerful and takes fewer blocks of your personal memory. You can also download higher versions of programs that you already have and replace them.

One of the major ongoing threats in TRON 2.0 is a nasty computer virus that has infected the mainframe. This virus is represented by green glowing enemies and these creepy wraith-like creatures look like evil wizards with flowing robes. When these creatures hit you there is a good chance you will get infected with the virus and your subroutines will start to malfunction. Fortunately, you have an antiviral procedural available that you can cleanse any infected subroutines. The trick here is that any other program in adjoining blocks can get infected as the virus spreads. This means you may have to temporarily create gaps in your memory to protect non-infected programs. There are also anti-viral subroutines that offer some protection from attacked and corrupted downloads if you have them installed.

There is also a chance your memory can get fragmented during these attacks and you will have to use the defrag procedural to free up the block so you can use it again. The third utility is a Port procedural that allows you to adapt code for your personal use. Often you will encounter “unknown code” and this will identify it for you after you have downloaded it.

If all of this sounds complicated you’re wrong. The clever ring menu interface is totally intuitive and allows you to drag and drop subroutines from storage and place them in active memory or drop them on the procedural hot spots. Truth be told, this is probably one of the best character management screens in RPG history – granted TRON 2.0 is not as complex as most conventional RPG games.

So now that you know the rules of the TRON universe let’s talk about the actual gameplay. You being your cyber-adventure with a bit of training that teaches you how to interact with the world and how to fight. Your initial weapon is your disc that can be tossed like a Frisbee and will return to you. You have limited steering ability over the disc and you can even get creative and ricochet off walls and ceilings – a tactic that proves most useful when the ICP’s break out the riot shields.

Later on you will acquire new and more powerful weapons via downloads, and these can be further upgraded into some devastating energy weapons. The trick here lies in the fact that the more damaging a weapon is the more energy it consumes and the fewer times you can use it. Plus any energy you use for weapons is energy that is unavailable to you for downloads until you recharge. Thankfully, health and energy ports are quite abundant and strategically placed where the designers anticipated you would need them.

One of the coolest concepts in TRON 2.0 is also one of the oldest in gaming – locks and the keys that open them. In TRON things are locked down with security protocols and you unlock them with “permissions”. A lock is comprised of a ring divided into eight slices (or permissions). Scattered about the level in either data cubes or core dumps left behind by defeated enemies, you can collect permissions numbered one through eight. As you collect these slices your ring slowly fills in. Locks vary in complexity usually proportional to the importance of the data or system they are protecting. You might need Permission 2 to access a data cube but a Com I/O might require Permissions 1, 3, 5, and 6. Usually, if you are thorough in exploring a level finding these permissions will simply flow with the game and not require any dedicated searching.

To mix-up the FPS portions of the game the designers have thrown in some light cycle racing. This is a great homage to the original movie and offers a completely unique challenge as you race these supersonic bikes around the grid trying to trap your opponents with the light walls of your own bike or send them crashing into a wall. Since some gamers may not be able to grasp the controls or concept of these fast-paced “arcade” levels you are allowed to skip them if you wish. Light cycle racing is also offered as a standalone game mode with many challenging arenas and a progressive tournament that allows you to unlock power-ups and new bikes.

I would be remiss if I didn’t warn you about the jumping puzzles. Yes, there are jumping puzzles and some are quite challenging, but TRON 2.0 is one of the few games that puts valuable rewards at the end of these challenges like weapon upgrades or valuable permissions. Since you can quicksave after each jump there is no reason to complain.

However, I will complain with the lack of save slots. For some reason TRON limits the number of times you can save your game. I typically like to save (and not overwrite) my game at the beginning of each level so I can revisit my favorites later, but with only ten slots I had to make some hard decisions about which games to overwrite and keep overwriting. Come on, Monolith, this isn’t a console game. You can QuickSave as often as you like and the game does AutoSave at the beginning of each level but that save is overwritten when you start the next.

The opening movie does little to setup the plot for TRON 2.0 but rather the underlying conspiracy and story is slowly revealed through a seemingly endless stream of emails and video archives that you will download during your travels inside the system. These emails are short and quite informative and presented in such a way that they don’t get annoying like those other games that rely on lengthy journals, books, and letters to fill in the plot. One interesting twist is when you travel to the old mainframe from the original movie and read some 20-year old email - one even mentions the birth of Jet.

TRON 2.0 is a game that is heavily scripted and for that reason could be considered a bit linear. You are lead around on your quests and corralled through a series of locked doors and I/O ports, but you are never really aware of it until the game is over. You get so caught up in the moment, and that’s what TRON 2.0 is about – “moments”. There are so many action segments that intersperse the standard FPS that you are literally swept away.

One of the most thrilling of these moments is when you must escape a system-wide reformat. This was such a horrific experience that I will probably feel sorry for the programs on my hard drive the next time I have to format my system. Picture if you will a giant translucent red wall that slowly advances through the level erasing everything in its path including your pursuing enemies. Then you get trapped against a force field and the red wall is inching closer and closer…

TRON 2.0 also offers some multiplayer action but not like you would expect from other FPS games. There are no FPS death matches, team assaults, or Capture the Byte games. Instead, you get the Disc Arena and Light Cycles. The Disc Arena was strangely missing from the single-player game, which is disappointing since this is a pretty cool game. It is certainly a blast playing it over the net. Light Cycles are great fun, but due to some totally unrealistic requirements will probably never be played by anyone other than game reviewers and a very few other people who have cool bosses that let them play games on their office LAN. Yes, the light cycles require a sturdy 100-base LAN, so unless you are planning a LAN party forget about this aspect of the game.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then a 60,000-word essay is just a click away, but allow me to sum up the visuals in a few hundred. TRON 2.0 is built on the Jupiter graphics engine developed by Monolith and used in games like NOLF2. While that engine is impressive in and of itself, Monolith knew they needed that extra “touch” to capture the essence of TRON and make the colors leap off the screen and burn into your retina. Consulting with the video gurus at NVIDIA, they were able to come up with some custom neon glow effects unlike anything ever seen before. The results are truly breathtaking and could usher in a new style of video game.

At first glance the levels look deceptively simple with lots of black and flat shaded areas. Polygons are all highlighted with brightly lit neon borders that pulse with vibrant colors and the characters all emit red, blue, yellow, purple, and sickly green glows. The level of texture detail cleverly mirrors the technology of the environment you are currently in. Inside the mainframe the walls are ablaze with cycling lights and flowing data, and the Internet City is simply beyond words. If the inside of the Internet really looks like this then please digitize me now. When you port back to the 20-year old mainframe the graphics take on a purposely dated look with lots of simple flat-shaded polygons.

The weapons are a bit on the extreme side but then again, so is the entire concept of TRON. Weapons magically materialize on your arm when you select them from the menu and some (like the Drunken Dims) are crazy but incredibly cool. Like the levels and everything in them, weapons pulse with an inherent energy that is shared with everything in TRON.

The movies are very well done featuring the crisp graphics of the game engine and using excellent character models with detailed facial features. The opening credit sequence is one of the few (if not only) opening credits I will watch every time I start a new game – it’s just that cool! One of my favorite movies takes place later in the game and shows the human world through the POV of the TRON universe – as an electrical schematic with humans being represented as boxes on a 3D floor plan.

It’s hard to single out special effects since this game is one giant special effect. I guess I could point out the subtleties like damage being shown as binary 1’s and 0’s spiraling off the enemy as you hit them or even simple things like when you die the screen blanks out like the power was cut. Some stuff is really subtle like the random messages or data that streams over your HUD. Walking through the Internet City my “spam filter” shutdown and I started getting annoying banner ads. If your Profile subroutine gets infected the normal target data is all corrupted with random text and graphic garbage.

TRON 2.0 is the epitome of visual perfection both in presentation and gameplay. I could go on and on but you should be playing it already.

I’m not sure what the inside of a computer sounds like. All I can hear are my five cooling fans humming in chorus, but I doubt if I could journey inside my motherboard it would sound nearly as cool as all the hums, beeps, and synthesized electrical noises that the designers have used to bring this cyber world to life. In as much as TRON 2.0 pushes the current graphics technology, it also is the first title to support the new EAX 4.0 standard with 7.1 surround sound. Now you are truly “in the game”.

Speech is excellent thanks to some professional voice acting, both by the stars and the supporting cast. Bruce Boxleitner (original TRON), and Cindy Morgan (also from the movie) lend their voices, and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos takes a break from X-Men to join the voice cast. All of the voices have been given suitable electronic enhancement when necessary. Much of the dialog is quite humorous, especially the idle chatter you can hear if you eavesdrop on the ICP’s. Lines like, “You’d lose your header if it wasn’t compiled on” will have you laughing aloud.

The Disc Arena game offered a minimal online diversion and finding other players was easy using the GameSpy feature, but I doubt anyone will find any long-term value in the online component. The light cycles would be amazing if they could optimize the network code so you didn’t need a super-LAN to play them on.

There are no diverging paths or alternate endings and while the RPG elements and complex array of subroutines allow you to play the game differently, it might not be enough of an incentive to replay the entire game over again anytime soon. TRON 2.0 is definitely one of those titles you will break out to show off to your friends, especially if you have one of those fancy new NVIDIA FX video cards.

If you enjoyed the movie then you are going love this game and if you’ve never seen the movie chances are you will be headed to your local video store after a few hours with TRON 2.0 This is one of the few move-inspired games that actually manages to pull off the crossover, and both the film and the game complement each other in a way that could only be accomplished by the cooperation and careful attention to detail of both the studio and the game designers. As much as TRON broke new cinematic ground in 1982, TRON 2.0 proves to be just as innovative 20 years later.